A federal judge has refused to issue a gag order in a lawsuit accusing a Kansas military school of allowing older students to abuse younger ones in the name of discipline.

Lawyers for St. John’s Military School in Salina sought to bar the parties from talking publicly about the case.

But U.S. District Judge John Lungstrum said Tuesday a trial is still more than a year away, so that pretrial publicity likely wouldn’t taint the prospective jury pool.

The lawsuit by parents of four former cadets contends the school allows and encourages abuse of younger students by older ones.

St. John’s has settled nine similar lawsuits since 2006. The school’s lawyer says the motion for a gag order was an attempt to keep the case from being tried in the media.